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Paramount has finally released a full trailer for the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and the internet just wouldn’t be the internet if everybody wasn’t up in arms over it. But along with the cries of RUINED FOREVER there are a lot of seriously legitimate concerns about the latest take on TMNT.
Many of them are relevant to the current state of paint­by­number Hollywood blockbusters as a whole. The first seriously relevant issue: Whitewashing, aka a character who is explicitly supposed to be a person of color being changed into a white person. In this case, iconic villain The Shredder, who is Japanese (or, in one version, an alien posing as Japanese), is played by not­at­all­Asian William Fichtner. Fichtner is a great actor, and he puts on a good show in the trailer, but there are plenty of Japanese actors who could have played that role just as well. The only reason the turtles were ninjas at all was because they were raised by a Japanese immigrant who practiced martial arts, and being steeped in that culture is a significant part of the story. Is Fichtner’s Shredder some white otaku? Does the turtles’ adoptive father Splinter just begrudge him his cultural appropriation?
Splinter himself has been cast as little person Danny Woodburn, but while Splinter is also supposed to be Japanese ­American, he’s also a mutant rat. Whitewashing a role that relies heavily on special effects rankles a bit less.
There’s always a chance there’s a good plot reason for this that’ll be revealed in the movie itself, like Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin in Iron Man 3, but I’m not holding my breath for that kind of clever subversion.
The second is tone: Apart from the banter of the turtles themselves, the new TMNT movie seems as generically dark and disaster porn­y as any other PG­13 wannabe action blockbuster. Even the palette is stuck in the orange­and­cyan of 2007’s Transformers. Some buildings are damaged! There are police cars! There’s some seemingly random violence! Also a voice­over about how the city is out of control and needs a hero! And just when you start to think Christopher Nolan lied about making another Batman movie, there are the turtles.
With the tone set like that, the turtles seem genuinely jarring. What has been hidden from these poor fools to make them still so carefree? How can they cheerfully eat pizza at a time like this? Can’t they see how dark everything is? Can’t they see the cyan palette letting them know this is a serious action movie, produced (though not directed) by Michael Bay?
And the third is simple: Why? Why did they need to add Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the list of hollow, soulless remakes of old things? It feels almost as pointless as the recent PG­13 remakes of Paul Verhoeven’s ultra­violent classics Total Recall and Robocop. The originals are still perfectly good movies and the original 1990 TMNT movie is still a perfectly good movie, though in this case they’re adding violence instead of scrubbing it away. Can it really be considered a cynical cash grab if it fails as badly as those did?
At least April O’Neil wears yellow, though I can’t imagine we’ll see Megan Fox in anything so practical as the cartoon version’s coveralls.